Hi All,

DB Roundup

Thanks for your detailed and thoughtful responses to your media use. One thing I noticed was that no one said anything about reading any print media (magazines, newspapers) or radio, and only Panagiotis specifically mentioned podcasts.

There were a lot of commonalities among everyone’s responses. Many people use YouTube to learn new things, and how effective people thought YouTube’s algorithm is on constantly providing more suggested videos to watch. Social media use as relaxation and a response to boredom, or just out of habit were also common

A handful of people occasionally watched TV news, but most of you get your news through social media, including Maya who specified the personalization as important “I like to choose what news outlets and even individual activists and journalists I follow daily.” This personalization is in part what makes social media platforms so enjoyable to use, and also reinforces the filter bubble effect.

Yuxiang noted that because of the Coronavirus, having internet access is incredibly important in order for people to work and go to school, saying, “Personally, I can’t imagine how an internet outage, even for just one day, could jeopardize my education progress.” This is a great point, and one we’ll cover next week when our topics are the digital divide and net neutrality.

Weekly Readings & Assignment

This week we have one reading on the concept of objectivity in journalism, and two short readings as an introduction to library databases, as well as some initial exploration into doing research using the CCNY Libraries OneSearch tool. As always, the readings are linked in the course schedule.

The assignment this week is a reading quiz, which is also linked in the schedule, and as a DB. 

Finally, we’ll start our weekly face to face meetings via Zoom on Monday Sept 14. I’ll send log in info separately, so keep an eye out for that.

Sarah